The Lost King (2 page)

Giesk closed his eyes a
moment in intense relief. His shirt, beneath his lab coat, was
wringing wet with sweat.

"Yes, my lord.
Thank you, my lord."

Giesk reached out,
flipped a switch. The light beams attached to the mans body flared to
a brightness that made all in the room avert their eyes. The limbs
strapped to the table jerked. The man gave one last, hollow cry. The
body stiffened and then, horribly, relaxed. The lights blinked out,
and it was all over.

The Warlord had
remained to watch the end. He stood beside the body, his hands
clasped behind his back beneath the long, flowing red cloak that hung
from golden clasps upon his shoulders—clasps carved in the
shape of a phoenix. His lips—a thin, dark line beneath the
visor of his helm—parted to speak the dead mans eulogy.

"Three days, yet
at the end you broke."

Turning on his booted
heel, the Warlord nearly collided with Dr. Giesk, who was coming to
remove his monitoring instruments from the corpse. Dr. Giesk shrank
back, the Warlord swept around him. The centurions sprang to
attention. Giesk once more approached the body, his hand
outstretched.

Pausing in the doorway,
slightly turning his head, the Warlord remarked, "Don't touch
it, Giesk."

The doctor snatched
back his hand. "But, my lord," he protested, his eyes on
the jewel that no longer gleamed, but seemed as devoid of life as the
still, cold chest on which it rested, "the gem's value is
measured in planets! Surely, you can't mean to—"

"The starjewel is
buried with its possessor," said the Warlord. "The curse of
God on any who steal it."

A patriotic member of
the Republic, Giesk had no fear of the wrath of some mythical eternal
being. The doctor did, however, have a healthy fear of the wrath of
the Warlord. Giesk began peeling plastic off the corpse's gray skin.

The Warlord, with a
smile that was only a deepening of the dark slit of his lips beneath
the helm, left the room, detailing a centurion to stay behind.

"You had better
hurry, Giesk," the Warlord remarked from the hallway. "We
leave within the hour."

The doctor was packing
his equipment away with the practiced ease of a man who had done this
sort of thing often.

"Five minutes, my
lord, not longer," Dr. Giesk promised, slamming lids, locking
latches, and coiling power cords most industriously.

There was no reply. The
Warlord was already halfway down the corridor. He walked swiftly, as
he tended to do when thinking, his pace dictated by the rapidity of
his thought. Almost running behind him, his guard of honor was
hard-pressed to keep up.

"Prepare the
shuttle to lift off, Lieutenant." The Warlord spoke into a
communications linkage inside his helmet. "And patch me through
to Admiral Aks."

"Yes, my lord,"
a voice crackled in response, and within seconds another voice
sounded in the Warlord's ear.

"Aks, here, my
lord."

"We will not
rejoin the fleet. Determine the location of a planet known as Syrac
Seven and plot a course for it. I want the ship ready to leave within
the hour."

"Yes, my lord."

"One thing more."

The Warlord paused
reflectively, both in thought and in his strides. Stopping before a
window, he glanced down the empty hall where only days before
students from this planet's solar system had been hurrying to
classes, discussing the problems of the ages in solemn, youthful
voices. The university had been closed by the Warlord's command when
he had arrived to take Stavros prisoner. The half-million students
and other members of the faculty had been ordered to leave.

Where did they go? the
Warlord wondered idly, his gaze flicking over the ancient brick
buildings. Six white columns— remnants of a bygone era—gleamed
in the system's white-yellow sun. Were the students crowded into one
of the small cities on this planet or had they taken this opportunity
to return to their homes? Had this been an unexpected holiday or a
major annoyance? The Warlord inspected the new, modern buildings with
their sleek, windowless design. His gaze went to the smooth,
well-kept lawns, the flower beds cultivated in letters that stood for
an abbreviation of the university's name.

What was the name? He
couldn't remember. Not that it mattered.

I wonder, he thought,
resuming his walk just as the centurions behind him had managed to
catch their collective breath, if Stavros had been a good professor.

"Admiral Aks,"
he spoke into the commlink, "I want every object within a
one-hundred-kilometer radius of where I am standing destroyed."

"My lord?"
The admiral's tone indicated he did not believe he had heard
correctly.

"Destroyed,"
the Warlord repeated slowly and distinctly. "I trust we are not
experiencing a communications malfunction, Admiral Aks?"

"N-no, my lord."
Aks ventured a protest. "The university is extremely popular, my
lord. This will create a most unpleasant incident in the solar
system."

"Then it will give
our diplomats something to do besides shuttling from one pleasure spa
to another. Inform the ruler of this world—"

"Governor, my
lord."

"Governor, then!
Inform him that no one, not even the so-called intelligentsia, is
above the law. These people knew what Stavros was, yet they harbored
him. I will show them, as I have shown others, what happens to those
who shelter the Guardians. If the governor has any complaints, he may
send them to the Congress through the official channels."

"As you command,
my lord." The Admiral's voice crackled and went out.

Dr. Giesk was the last
to board the shuttle, arriving in a flurry of white lab coat,
clanking instruments, trailing wires, and fluttering necktie. The
hatch slammed shut behind him, the airlock sealed. Fancifully
designed and painted to resemble a phoenix, the red and gold
shuttlecraft tucked its landing gear neatly up into its sleek body
and lifted off-planet swiftly, spiraling up into the sky.

Out on the fringes of
the solar system, waiting to receive its commander, was the Warlord's
flagship. When it had been determined that the shuttle had broken
free of the planet's gravitational pull and was safely away, a beam
of laser light shot from a lascannon to the surface of the planet
below. The bombardment lasted only seconds, then ceased. The Warlord
arrived aboard his ship to find the course to Syrac Seven already
plotted. The flagship,
Phoenix,
sailed into the chartered
paths of hyperspace and vanished from sight.

On the planet below,
searing flames reduced to ash the university and the beautiful
countryside surrounding it, creating a ghastly, gigantic funeral pyre
for one corpse.

Adieu, adieu, adieu!
remember me.

William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
, Act I, Scene IV

The dock foreman
snarled impatiently when a shadow fell across his clipboard. The
shadow was not caused by clouds obscuring the sun—a rare
occurrence on the desertlike Syrac Seven. The shadow was caused by a
human body coming to stand between the dock foreman and the sun. And
thus the foreman snarled. He was a harassed and busy man. If the day
had been a year long on Syrac Seven—as it was, by report, on
Syrac Nine—he would not have had time enough to get everything
done.

Syrac Seven was at the
cross-routes of one of the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in
the galaxy. Huge space freighters were either in orbit waiting to
dock, on land waiting to be loaded, on land waiting to be unloaded,
or on land awaiting permission to get off. Their captains, ever
conscious that time is money, were invariably furious over
delays—real and imagined. Their crews were always
undisciplined—what could you expect of merchant seamen?—and
picked fights with the foreman's longshoremen, And, as if the foreman
needed any more trouble, the Syracusian government sent officials by
on a regular basis to throw everything into confusion.

One such personage had
been around that morning, accusing the dock foreman of turning a
blind eye to the theft of computer parts shipments en route to
underdeveloped planets; planets who were trying desperately to take
their places in the Republic, and who had been assured that computers
were the answer—provided the planet had electricity, of course.
The dock foreman recalled with pleasure his conversation with the
government official in which he'd described in graphic terms just
what the official could do with his computers. And it hadn't involved
plugging them in—at least not where one would normally plug one
in.

"Now why would
anyone on this blasted rock steal computer parts?" the dock
foreman bellowed, raising his head to glare at the person whose
shadow fell across his clipboard.

"They wouldn't,"
stated this person, although he appeared considerably astonished at
being thus addressed. "There's no market on this planet for
stolen computer parts."

The dock foreman
regarded the stranger with more interest and less irritation.

"You can see it. I
can see it. Why can't the friggin' government see it?" The dock
foreman shoved a large finger into the stranger's chest. "Drugs,
landcruisers, spacecraft parts—those get stolen so fast that
all you'll find left is the smell. But computer parts?" He
snorted.

A captain of one of the
lumbering, elephantine freighters leaned over a railing and yelled
that he was six days behind schedule and what was the dock foreman
going to do about it.

The dock foreman yelled
back that his men were working as fast as they could, remarking that
he (the captain) would wait his turn like everyone else. The dock
foreman then added what he (the captain) could do if he didn't feel
like waiting.

The captain issue a
threat.

The dock foreman made
an obscene gesture.

The captain stomped
over the metal deck in a rage, and the dock foreman turned back to
discover that the shadow remained across his clipboard. Apparently
this stranger hadn't dropped by to commiserate about the government.

"You still here?"
the dock foreman growled.

"Yes, I am still
here," the man said in a mild voice.

"Why?" the
dock foreman snapped, eyeing the stranger irritably.

The man might have been
considered tall, but he was thin-boned and stooped and his
height—which must have been beyond the ordinary—was
considerably reduced. Long wispy hair straggled over his shoulders
and hung down his back. Probably in his late forties, he was dressed
in faded blue jeans and a blue denim work shirt and appeared at first
glance to be a down-and-outer looking for work. But those soft,
delicate hands had never done manual labor, the dock foreman noted
shrewdly. And there was something about the faded blue eyes—set
in a pale, careworn face—which suggested that the stranger's
quick appraisal of the computer parts theft had not been casual. This
man was accustomed to giving serious, respectful consideration to all
matters, and the dock foreman appreciated being taken seriously for
once.

"Well, what do you
want?" he found himself asking grudgingly.

"I am looking for
a man I was told worked here," the man said, speaking almost
shyly, as if he weren't used to talking to strange people. His voice
matched his hands—refined, delicate, with an off-planet accent.
"His name is Mendaharin Tusca."

"You're in the
wrong place, mister!" The dock foreman laughed. "I ain't
got anyone working here with a silly-ass name like Men Da Ha Rin
Toosca!"

The stranger seemed to
wilt. A flicker of desperation kindled the faded eyes.

"Wait, please do
not go! This is quite urgent. Would there be anyone with a name
similar to that?"

The dock foreman, who
had started to walk away, turned back. "Well, there's a guy
works for me calls himself Tusk. That's close, I guess. You can see
him. He's right over there. Black-skinned human." He jerked his
thumb in the direction of a group of men and aliens who were loading
crates onto a skid. "That him?"

"I do not know."
The man sounded embarrassed. "It might be him. You see, I've
never met him before. Could I talk to, uh . . . Tusk ... for just a
few moments? The matter is serious, or I would not take him away from
his work."

The dock foreman
scowled, then sighed and shook his head, wondering why he was even
wasting his time with this bum, much less calling off one of his men
to come chat with him. The stranger stood looking at him
apologetically, implying he understood and appreciated the dock
foreman's problems and would do his best not to add to them.

"Hey, Tusk!"
The foreman's breath exploded in a rumbling roar that bounced over
the noise of the forklifts and cranes and the wind that swept across
the flat surface of the docks.

The black-skinned human
straightened up from cinching a rope around a crate. Staring across
the sun-baked cement, his eyes squinting in the bright light, he
looked to see who was calling.

The dock foreman made a
motion with his arm.

The man called Tusk
gave the alien standing next to him a pat on its bony back, then
pointed at the foreman. The alien nodded one of its heads, and Tusk
sauntered toward the stranger with lazy, easy strides. He was dressed
in the working clothes of the dock which—in the heat of Syrac
Seven—was practically nothing, and his ebony skin glistened
with sweat in the bright sunlight. About average height for a human,
Tusk was muscular and well built. His short hair was tightly curled
and, when he turned his head, a glint of silver caught the light,
sparkling from his left earlobe.

As the young man
approached them, the dock foreman glanced curiously at the stranger.
Tusk was a rough-looking character—one who easily held his own
in the occasional brawls that broke out among the dock workers and
the sailors. The ordinary citizenry of Syrac Seven generally crossed
over and walked on the other side of the street to avoid the likes of
Tusk, and the dock foreman wondered if this gende stranger wouldn't
suddenly remember that he had an appointment elsewhere.